Rose twisted desperately and Patterson shouted in triumph as he felt his knife bite deep, right up to the hilt.
But Rose had done enough to avoid the death blow. The knife has missed by inches and buried itself in his backpack.
The saw-toothed back of the knife caught on the tough material for a second and Rose pressed home his advantage. Too close to swing his fists, Rose struck out with his elbows like a Thai boxer, slamming the bony joints up under Patterson’s ribs.
The big soldier barked like a seal as he tried to force air into his winded lungs. He staggered backwards and Rose helped him on his way with a perfectly timed kick. Ten crampon points struck Patterson high on the chest and he fell backwards, tipping over the lip of the sled and into the whirling snow behind the speeding Supacat.
Rose crawled back and slumped into the passenger seat next to Carver.
‘You okay?’ Carver asked.
‘I’ll live.’
‘That remains to be seen.’
Above them the chopper swooped in again. The snow to their left exploded in a huge geyser of steam and smoke. The blast almost threw Rose from his seat.
‘They’re dropping grenades!’
‘I think you’ve pissed them off,’ Carver replied.
More black shapes dropped into their path. Carver wrenched on the steering yoke as another volcano of ice and snow erupted just a few yards away.
They raced onwards, carving series of long chicanes between fountains of exploding snow.
Another handful of deadly black shapes fell from the chopper above. Carver tried to weave between them, but one fell directly into the trailing sled.
‘Shit!’ Carver swore. ‘How do you detach the sled?’
‘No time,’ Rose shouted. He saw a dune of wind-blown snow and hauled on the control yoke. The ‘cat charged up the dune before cutting back from the lip like a surfer as Rose pushed back the other way.
The sled fishtailed on the slope. The universal bearing between sled and ‘cat groaned in protest as the sled’s lighter weight took it higher until it flipped over. The ‘cat slowed as the sled—now turned completely turtle—skidded along on its rails.
A second later the grenade went off. The explosion lifted the sled ten feet from the snow, tilting the ‘cat forwards and giving them one almighty kick up the backside. But the sled had done its job. It had contained the explosion, just enough to allow the ‘cat to escape unscathed.
Rose leaned down and yanked hard on the cotter pin that kept the sled attached to the universal linkage. It came free and they left the shattered sled behind, racing onwards on the six wheeled ATV.
Their desperate flight had taken them in a huge circle. Frazier didn’t want them to make it to the mountains. He was herding them back to the crash site. Rose saw the second chopper angling in for a landing. They’d have no chance against two helicopters. They had to do something and do it quickly.
The helicopter thundered overhead again, lower this time. A mass of grenades dropped from the sky. Frazier had changed tactics: this was not herding, this was saturation bombing.
The ‘cat fishtailed wildly as Carver tried to dodge the falling bombs, but there was no way they would miss them all.
‘That way!’ Rose shouted, pointing towards the largest concentration of grenades.
‘Are you crazy?’
‘Trust me.’ He grabbed the control yoke and steered the ‘cat towards the grenades. The steely black seeds of destruction had buried themselves in the snow, waiting to flower, and the ‘cat rolled right over them!
The explosion lifted the whole ‘cat out of the snow. Clouds of superheated steam shot out from the underside of the powerful little vehicle, but the ‘cat seemed undamaged.
Carver looked at Rose incredulously.
‘The underside’s armoured,’ Rose explained. ‘It’s designed to protect the crew from landmines.’
The chopper wheeled in the sky. Frazier must have used up all the grenades in his last attack because he changed tactics once again. Automatic rifle fire churned the snow around them. Bullets slammed into the Supacat’s rear pallet, chewing through the fibreglass shell and biting deep into the ‘cat’s innards. Black smoke started to belch from the engine compartment.
‘It’s losing power!’ Carver shouted.
The damaged engine was tearing itself to pieces, making a noise like scrap iron being flung down a lift shaft.
The needle on the speedometer started to drop: forty, thirty... They would soon be sitting ducks for Frazier’s next pass.
Rose scanned their surroundings: there must be some shelter, somewhere to take cover. But the glacier’s gradual slope and low hills of wind-blown snow offered them none.
The ‘cat was almost dead. Ahead of them the chopper banked high in the sky, turning for the final pass. This time there was nowhere to run: no way they could dodge the oncoming hail of bullets.
‘Take her up that slope,’ Rose ordered, pointing to a low, but steep-sided hummock.
Carver used the last of the ‘cat’s momentum to haul it’s wounded bulk up the steepest side of the hill as Rose grabbed hold of the roll bar and leaned out as far as he could.
‘Hang on!’ he shouted.
The chopper swooped closer. Carver suddenly saw Rose’s plan and threw her weight together with his.
The ‘cat lurched on the slope. It toppled slowly as if in slow motion as the steep angle, combined with Rose and Carver’s efforts, hauled it over. It teetered on its side for a second before rolling onto its back, taking Rose and Craver with it.
Frazier’s bullets pinged of the ‘cat’s armoured underbelly.
Rose and Carver crouched in the hollow space under the ‘cat. It was buried up to its gunnels in the snow, but the roll bar had saved them from being crushed. They were safe, for the moment.
‘We can’t stay here,’ Rose said as more bullets rang off the armour plates above their heads. It was like trying to hold a conversation inside a ringing church bell. Through a narrow gap he could see the chopper circling them like a shark around a wounded seal.
‘You’re right. King will drag us out and execute us personally.’
‘Any suggestions?’
‘Split up. The chopper can’t come after us both.’
‘You wouldn’t get a hundred feet.’
‘Well it’s better than waiting here.’
The scooped away some of the snow to make a gap big enough to crawl through. It was hopeless. All they could do was make a desperate dash on foot, but there was nowhere to run to. The best they could hope for was to die on their feet, still fighting.
‘Okay,’ Rose said. ‘On three: one... two...’
A slim trail of smoke drew a thin line out from the mountains in the distance. Something whistled across the sky overhead and slammed into the hovering helicopter. The cockpit exploded in an expanding orange fireball, but for a frozen second the rest of the helicopter stayed intact, rotors spinning, until a second explosion blossomed deep in the guts of the aircraft. The fuel tanks detonated with a palpable wave of concussion that tore the helicopter apart and the flaming wreckage, fell out of the sky in a rain of burning metal splinters.
CHAPTER 10
King watched in horror as the first helicopter exploded. Frazier had failed, and with the enemy so close there would be no second chances. The best they could do now would be to deny their enemy the prize.
The second helicopter was taking its time in reaching them. The pilot had no wish to be blown out of the air, and was approaching in a zigzag pattern, hugging the glacier and churning up his own personal blizzard which also helped to conceal his approach.
The pilot swung the big chopper in like a stunt driver performing a power slide. The open hatch loomed out of the blizzard: their only way off the mountain. Alex Hill leaned out of the hatch and offered an arm to King. Campbell followed, the giant Scot making no attempt to help the survivors. He stood on the edge of the loading ramp with his M4 in hand.
‘Go! Go! Go!’ King shouted towards the cockpit and the helicopter lurched into the sky.
Another missile tore through the blizzard, missing the chopper by only a few yards and slamming into the glacier where it had sat a moment earlier. The detonation shook the whole ice shelf, knocking the survivors from their feet. The pressure wave made the helicopter jerk violently, and—with a muffled shout of surprise—Mark Campbell pitched out of the doorway and fell, sprawling, on the snow.
In a howl of whirling snow, worthy of Ragnarok itself, the helicopter took off down the slope, leaving the unfortunate Campbell behind.
‘He’s not coming back, Campbell,’ Keyes said.
The big man spun to face him. He still had the M4 in his hands and he swung its muzzle through a wild arc, as if expecting to be jumped by an angry mob. His gaze darted between Keyes and the distant mountains. The mighty terraces of ice and cold, black stone rose to the south forming a massive amphitheatre with centre stage at the crash site.
‘You’re not going anywhere, Campbell,’ Keyes said in a measured tone. He wanted to appear authoritative, but not threatening. The last thing they needed now was to put Campbell under any more pressure. He was still holding the M4, and there were more than enough rounds for each of the survivors. ‘Put the gun away.’
Again Campbell’s gaze darted over Keyes’s shoulder to the mountains beyond. What was he looking at?
Campbell’s shoulders slumped and he let the muzzle of his carbine droop towards the ice.
‘That’s better,’ Keyes said. ‘Now, do you want to tell me what the hell’s going on?’
Campbell tore his gaze away from the mountain to stare directly at him.
‘You want to know what’s going on?’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you: we’re all going to die.’
◆◆◆
Another dune of wind-blown snow reared up in front of the speeding Supacat, and Frank gunned the turbocharged diesel engine. They hit it straight on, and the two tonne vehicle lurched into the air, its mass tearing through the soft powder at the top of the dune and sending white plumes of fine crystals in all directions.
‘Sorry about that,’ he shouted over his shoulder. Tej sat in the sled behind, perched on top of the black box they had liberated from the tail cone. Marinucci could see him clinging onto the thick rope handles than ran down each side of the sled. He looked okay.
They had seen the first chopper take off when they were just starting the journey back from the tail cone. Marinucci had thought nothing of it at first: a change in plan, that was all. These things happened all the time. The best plan in the world could always be improved on once you actually sussed out the situation on the ground. Then there had been the sound of a gunshot – even in the rarefied air on the glacier, that sharp sound had carried. Marinucci was not a military man, but he’d been in enough tight spots in his life to develop an acute sensitivity to the sound of gunfire.
When the second chopper had taken off, just after the sound of the shot, he had decided that now was not the time to get stuck away from camp. The shooting made him nervous, but the thought of being left out of whatever was unfolding around their only means of transport off the mountain was far worse.
He’d had a great view of the explosion of the first chopper, and had even managed to trace the vapour trail of the missile that had hit it back to the slopes of the Raikhot peak. It seemed to have come out of nowhere.
The radio crackled: dead static for the last half hour. Marinucci ignored it and concentrated on making the best time he could.
◆◆◆
King stood by the open hatch, staring down at the crash site and the scattering of people, little more than bright patches of colour against the snow. Damn it all to hell! A couple more hours that was all he would have needed. They had been so close.
After twenty four years in army intelligence, King had seen too much death. He had been responsible for much of it, both—as a younger man—by his own hand, and more recently by proxy with the stroke of a pen. It was something he was good at, something he could deal with, but not something he enjoyed. It was an unpleasant necessity: a grim fact of life in the deep, dark stratum of government in which he worked.
King was a murderer, to be sure, but he did not take his duty lightly. If he did not do what he did, then someone else would, and King would not wish that responsibility on his worst enemy.
He extended the aerial on the radio transmitter in his hand, and flicked the safety cap off the firing switch. For once it would have been nice to be a hero. As he jammed his thumb down on the firing switch a flash of movement caught his eye: a thin, wispy trail of vapour reaching out towards him from the distant mountain.
◆◆◆
For Rose and Carver the two explosions came almost simultaneously—one in the sky as the retreating helicopter was tagged by another surface-to-air missile. The other was a rumble of thunder from the mountains to the south. A long drum roll of chained detonations that made the whole glacier tremble.
That was what Frazier was doing when he went off on the second Supacat, Rose thought. He wasn’t checking for the chance of an avalanche, he was trying to start one!
The concussion wave of the charges Frazier had set rippled through the glacier. There was a rumble like thunder that echoed around the natural amphitheatre of the glacier bowl.
Rose had thought that it would take a huge avalanche to cross the mile of gently sloping ice between them and the mountains. He feared that he was about to be proven right.
The heavy winter snows lying thick on the mountains’ shoulders were shrugged off. Sheets of ice and slabs of compacted snow as dense as concrete started to move. Deeper layers that had hung for countess seasons were all released at once as the delicate adhesion that held them gave way under the unnatural energy that Frazier’s charges had released. The mountains shook and sloughed off a deadly white tsunami that slowly, inexorably, started to gather speed down the slope.
Here it comes, thought Rose, King’s backup plan: a great white hand, with bones of ice to wipe the slate clean; to bury any trace of the Fairchild and all its secrets with a fist the size of a mountain.
Together they sprinted towards the crash site.
◆◆◆
Doctor Keyes staggered as the glacier quivered beneath his feet. The bridge of snow and ice that sealed the fissures in the ice started to fall away. The ice around the crash site, weakened already by the impact of the Fairchild, started to flex. Stresses that had built up over decades relaxed in a creaking readjustment of the glacier’s ancient bones. There was a tremendous noise, like that of a giant cracking his knuckles, and the huge fissure that ran across the glacier from east to west opened up with an evil, jagged smile.
Tributary fissures shot out in all directions as the movement, probably more movement than the ice had seen in a millennium, produced secondary stresses with rippings and creakings all their own.
One crack shot through the ice, faster than a man could run: a dark shadow under a thin crust of snow followed immediately by a widening gap into which slabs the size of paving stones dropped away into black nothingness.
Hadeeqa saw it coming. She had been standing by Doctor Keyes, holding protectively onto the cloth of his trouser leg as the drama with King had unfolded. She only had a chance to take a breath, before the ice opened up under her and she fell screaming into the void.
Keyes fell too. He was still holding onto the orange, plastic sled of Morcellet’s stretcher, and as the ice gave way beneath his boots he instinctively held the stretcher in a death grip, almost pulling the whole thing—along with Garrett on the other end—into the crevasse with him.
Morcellet screamed as he fell to the floor, the dull blades of his broken bones grinding inside him, cutting through the fog of the morphine even as they cut his own flesh. The stiff plastic stretcher was a see-saw, with its fulcrum on the lip of the crevasse. The dead weight of Doctor Keyes dangling from one end tilted the stretcher upwards, until Morcellet was s
taring right into the fissure’s gaping maw. The only thing that stopped the Frenchman from shooting off the edge was the tough web of restraints that held him into the stretcher, and Garrett’s dogged resistance as he dug his heels in on the other end of the see-saw.
More snow fell away into the abyss. The snow near the edge was crumbling, falling into space like a thousand years of erosion seen through time-lapse photography.
‘Ne me laissez pas tomber! Don’t drop me, Garrett!’ Morcellet screamed. The message got through. Garrett held on, even as the snow fell away and they were all pulled further towards the crevasse.
Then the weight was gone. Either the doctor’s grip had slipped, or he had let go rather than pull his companions to a shared doom. With no weight on the other end of the see-saw, Garrett stumbled backwards away from danger, still holding onto the Frenchman’s stretcher.
◆◆◆
Rose and Carver sprinted towards the site. He could see the huge crevasse around the crashed plane had opened up. It grew bigger as he watched. Rose was surprised to see Campbell standing near the fissure. King, it seemed, had no qualms about leaving his own men behind. As Rose approached the big Scot swung around, his rifle at his shoulder, more out of instinct than anything else. Faced with the unarmed Rose he let the muzzle drop back down to his boots.
The fissure that had swallowed Hadeeqa and the Doctor groaned again as the mountains dumped a million tonnes of snow and ice onto the glacier’s upper reaches. It cut the party in two, with Campbell, Rose and Carver on one side and Garrett and Morcellet next to the crashed plane on the other. The fissure extended several tens of yards in either direction, and they only had a minute before the avalanche hit them. Rose looked up the slope of the glacier. The avalanche was a fuzzy white cloud obscuring the base of the mountains. Even allowing for the relatively gentle slope of the glacier, the momentum of the megatonnes of material would force the wave forwards at over a hundred miles an hour.
He looked at Garrett across the fissure. It was too far to jump. And even if they could, the Fairchild’s fuselage would be scant shelter against the freight train that was accelerating towards them. It seemed hopeless.
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